Issue 39 of Fortunatae includes five articles (four in Spanish and one in English) and a review covering a broad range of topics: the poems of Oppian in Greece and Aelianus in Rome on animal life and the difficult relationship with humans; the deification of Augustus in Virgil’s Georgics; the role of food and Athenian naval hegemony in the history of political universalism; the oracular tradition of Greece through epigraphy; and the Ciceronian topics in the humanistic work of Juan de Mariana.
In the first article, Alejandro Abritta (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina) examines the content and development of the passage by Oppian of Cilicia (Halieutica 5.519–588), in which he explains the procedure for capturing dolphins used by Thracian fishermen through a highly humanised description of the sacrifice of the female dolphin after the death of her calf, highlighting the similarity with or dependence on the account given by Aelianus (1.17 = 1.18 Hercher) on the same theme.
Julia Alejandra Bisignano (National University of La Plata, Argentina) analyses the Augustan myth as an association between divine (mainly Apollo), heroic (Achilles and Hercules), and regal (Romulus, Numa, and Alexander) models, proposing that it emerged by way of a social process that gradually prevailed through images, ceremonies, public events, as well as literature. The paper studies the process of mythologisation perceived in Virgil’s work, which moves between political and literary interest.
Diego Alexander Olivera (National Autonomous University of Mexico) resolves to demonstrate the existence of a universalist yearning for universal dominion by the city of Athens prior to that usually attributed to later Hellenic rulers.
Francisco Sánchez Torres (University of Cordoba, Spain) explores the symbolic and rhetorical space of the locus amoenus in the prefaces of Juan de Mariana’s treatises, as a highly popular Ciceronian exercise in Renaissance treatise writing.
Finally, Dimitris Vitalis (University of Cyprus) reappraises an oracular enquiry preserved on the front of a leaden plate and puts forward a reinterpretation of the last line of the text.